2025-04-01 A Meditation on Misguidance

“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. 7 Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” (2 Cor 1:3-7 ESV)

The false consolations that abound, these do a bit of a “draw” on the saint in his or her strapped in mode. A “draw”: they promise a relaxation of the heightened alert, they promise a warmth or fellowship where we can just go ahead and “forget all that”. Forget the capsule of faith we live in, forget the stark blight of life without Christ, forget that persecutions shall come.

Popular one moment, then beleaguered the next, Christ teaches His saints a bedrock not rude nor insensitive, but nonetheless Loaded, Shielded, Tamper-proof, Bountiful for the course. How, then, are we to warm to the occasion to Love on a beleaguered brother or sister? Without forgetting all that our capsule, dented but rupture-proof, and tested, makes Holy. All that it sanctifies. All that it feeds its occupant on, with the bread of life and with those words that none can steal away.

The clarifying Word, the Divisive proclamation, the near-gambit to the crux of the matter: these are Words we can feed on, they entail invocation of the blood, they are “felt” and “lived into”. They come about no-nonsense from that capsule-dweller who steers for the party and for the battle. Some try to make do with less “cleansed” words: these we can hear, the awful compromises, but still the prophetic gestalt, the prophetic word, the limber shake-it-all-out Prescription to the listener. No, we are those washed in some blood, washed in some foot washing that we didn’t quite ask for, washed because we had a litany of good works that needed be Crucified.

Therefore the soldier awakens on the correct side of the bed, to a gladsome sunrise of Full License to experiment, explore, be free of all crippling attempts to please an imagined Force, an imagined Demand. God wants us limber, and more than that, to have realized Grace, literally changing the legalistic landscape around things once called sinful and—dare we say it—now subsumed under the mantra: all are sinners; such-and-thus is no impediment to the Fellowship; if we confess with our lips and believe in our hearts, we shall be saved.

Grace makes law its perhaps unwilling playmate, lightening up a bit some demands of the Law, and therein advocating the “What if?” position. What if there is a heart-change in the Demand of Law? What if there are new commandments, as well? What, after all, is the difference between pent up competitive ambition or disdain for a peer, and the more spoken-over sins of concupiscence and greed? We at times Hate. We at times wish for the downfall of a competitor. We at times Judge.

The soldier is therefore brandishing a License, an Absolution, found precisely in the all-in corporate going with the flow, fact of sins committed and sins omitted, it literally at times being a sin not to sin as much as it is a sin to sin. His or her license and absolution comes about in a clenched teeth determined Proud Deed of service, where it becomes true the wide gap between him or her and the manifest one “of this world”. The sinner. The soldier is literally capable of being Free of Sin, provided the miracle-working, the spiritual Pentecost, the Calling of each and every one of us to rise up, is believed on. When we believe, then it becomes a bit comedic our sins, our things we do habitually, assuming no one shall see. Because after all, at the same time we are Perfected and Used by God the Father: who gives us a challenging role requiring our own self-guidance to Stand Up for once. To Stand Tall and make one truth claim after another: that this is the Lord’s provision, His pulpit, if not for any one solo in particular, but to imitate and replicate, by those possessed of a Calling to be Holy, Righteous, and True.

The saint’s capsule, his breakdown-free machine, is no reason to be callous to the meeker demands of a peer. We go low. We remember our own “Hey”, that hurt, our existential bout with deeds done in the past, the fact that those in holy Callings face utter humiliation when deeper sins manifest, or temptations formerly avoided are suddenly forgotten and indulged. Such is the fruit of saintly living, and the end of plain “going with the flow”: angular, abrupt, determined, we scream down sin and soldier ahead in blessed washed assurance.